Tips & Tricks: The Poor Mans Solution For Documents To Go

I am sure many people already know about this little tip but I thought it would be worth covering it on BerryReview in detail. Documents To Go now comes standard on OS 4.5+ but has some limitations that you need to pay $69 for the Premium version to get. Over time I have found a way to circumvent some of these limitations when I really need. The most annoying of these limitations is the inability to create new files. I attached some templates in the tutorial to help you get around that. You can just bookmark this page and redownload them anytime.

BlackBerry Documents To Go – Upgrade Workaround

Okay, I like Documents To Go on my BlackBerry Bold as much as anyone. I just wish the upgrade to premium feature wasn’t so expensive. I think it is $70. That’s a lot of money for an upgrade on phone software, in my opinion.

So I thought, huh, what is the difference between the Standard and Premium edition?

Well, there are a lot of great features, and someday, I might upgrade for them. But for now, I am just going to use the Standard version. In Word, I wanted to be able to create new documents, add bullets and numbered bullets, and format text, e.g., Bold, Italics, Underline. You have to upgrade to Premium to be able to do that.

Similarly, in Excel To Go, I wanted to create a new spreadsheet, format cells and use the basic functions, like Min, Max, Count, etc.

Here is how you can do that, with the Standard Edition, that comes on the BlackBerry Bold. It will probably work on other BlackBerrys, but I am not sure.

Create a Word Document on your PC, with those features, and call it Blank formatted Document.doc, and set it to Read Only. Copy it to your BlackBerry, on either the Device Memory or SD Card, via the USB cable. Or you could just email it to your BlackBerry.

On your BlackBerry, when you want to create a new Document or Spreadsheet, just start with those blank files. Open one, and immediately choose the Save As menu item, to save the file with your new filename.

For example, even though you could not add bullets to a Word document in the Standard edition, you CAN EDIT the bullets in a pre-existing document. If you want to add a new bullet, you can get on a bullet line and hit the Enter key. You can type over an existing bullet.

Similarly, once you get your cursor inside a bolded word, you can over-type it to be some other bolded word. You can Copy+Paste a Bolded word and then type over that word. Same with Italics, underline, SuperScript, SubScript.

Keep these formatted items at the top of your document, and then you can get to them easily, and when you are done with your document, just delete out the formatted stuff that you copied from, from the top, and you will be left with your formatted document.

Same with Sheet To Go. Open the formatted blank spreadsheet, do a Save As…. Copy the formatted cells to another cell location. It is a little tricky to copy a cell in this application. You have to hold down the Shift key to highlight a cell or two, and then the BlackBerry menu will have “Copy” in it. Do this, and then go to your new cell and then “Paste” will be available, to paste the item into your new location.

Modify the text in that new cell, which will already be formatted. You can also do an Edit Cell, to copy the text in a formula field, and paste it in another cell.

Some of the Premium features will never work this way, like Find/Replace and Spell Check, for example. But this little workaround might get you through the day.

Let me know in the comments if you have a documented solution for PowerPoint! I know it is possible but I have not had a chance to write it up myself.